The Encuentro

From Reconstruction to European Culture

The word *encuentro* means meeting.

Today it can describe many different things: a dance event, a particular format, a community, or even a brand.

Historically, however, the early European encuentro movement is especially interesting because it appears to have emerged from a desire to create a particular social experience.

The available material suggests that the people involved were not simply inventing another event format.

They were trying to recreate something they had experienced in Buenos Aires.

That distinction is important.

The desire to recreate Buenos Aires

In a 2015 article by Sabine Simoens, Philippe Gonella describes how he had been looking for a way to bring to France the tango he had experienced and danced in Buenos Aires.

Dirk De Brauwer describes the attraction in similar terms. He contrasts the growing festival and workshop culture with dancers who simply want to dance close embrace to traditional music: tango as intimate and authentic, without an intention to perform.

This gives us an important historical insight.

The early encuentro was not necessarily an invention looking for a purpose.

The purpose came first.

People wanted a particular way of being together.

The format developed around it.

Impruneta

Gonella describes discovering *Tango de mi Florencia, raduno milonguero* in Impruneta, near Florence, in 2007.

He describes it as an event dedicated to milongueros who enjoyed *abrazo cerrado*.

He then told Marcel Lambert about it. In 2009 they founded Milongueando de France and organised the first Les Cigales.

This chronology is important because it gives us a documented example of the moment when a social practice begins to become more explicit.

The concept already existed.

What Gonella and Lambert did was help formulate it and establish a European network around it.

The codes

The early codes associated with this movement included:

• invitation through mirada and cabeceo
• close embrace
• small movements
• dancing in the ronda
• respect for the other couples
• traditional tango music
• tandas and cortinas
• limited numbers
• balance between leaders and followers
• and an event structure without workshops and demonstrations.

These rules can look like a technical description of an event.

But they can also be understood as something more interesting.

They are an attempt to protect a social environment.

If dancers are expected to listen to one another, the floor needs to work.

If the dance is intimate, the environment needs to support that intimacy.

If the community is supposed to feel coherent, the people in the room matter.

The codes therefore regulate individual behaviour in order to create collective possibilities.

A code is not the culture

There is, however, a crucial distinction.

A code can describe conditions for a social experience.

It cannot guarantee the experience.

Close embrace does not automatically create connection.

Cabeceo does not automatically create dignity.

Traditional music does not automatically create musicality.

A small event does not automatically create community.

The people have to create something together.

This is perhaps the most important limitation of the encounter model.

The codes can protect the conditions.

They cannot produce the relationship.

Why did Europe need codes?

This becomes particularly interesting when we compare Europe with historical Buenos Aires.

In a dense local social environment, a dancer could learn by participating.

You watched.

You copied.

You were corrected.

You received invitations.

You learned what was accepted.

Over time, the culture became embodied.

In Europe, that context was not naturally present.

The social culture had to be reconstructed.

Writing down the codes can therefore be understood as an attempt to make some of the invisible visible.

In Bateson-inspired terms, it is almost a reversal of the normal relationship between culture and practice.

Instead of culture naturally providing the context for the dance, people encounter the dance and then try to reconstruct some of its cultural context.

The written code becomes a tool for rebuilding context.

The encuentro as a European solution

There is another important transformation.

Buenos Aires did not need to create a weekend event for people from fifteen countries to meet.

Europe did.

European dancers were spread across a continent.

The encuentro therefore became a temporary concentration of a dispersed social network.

People travelled.

They met.

They danced for long periods.

They returned home.

Then they met again somewhere else.

This travelling structure is not a defect in European social tango.

It is one of its defining characteristics.

The European encuentro solves a European geographical problem.

When the format becomes a brand

Today the word *encuentro* can mean at least three different things.

It can describe:

1. a culture and a way of being together;
2. an event format designed to support that culture;
3. a commercial label.

These meanings can coexist.

Commercial organisation is not automatically destructive. Events need venues, sound systems, administration and people who do the work.

But there is a point at which the market can begin to influence cultural content.

Participant limitation illustrates the ambiguity.

A limited number of dancers can protect the floor and the experience.

But exclusivity can also become part of the attractiveness of a commercial product.

The same practice can therefore serve both cultural and commercial purposes.

The important question is not simply whether money is involved.

It is:

**When does the event still serve the culture, and when does the culture begin to serve the event?**

Private encuentros

This question may help explain another development: private encuentros.

If a public event grows beyond the size or character that a particular group wants, people can use their own networks to create smaller gatherings.

In this case, the network itself becomes part of the infrastructure.

People already know one another.

They know how one another dances.

They know what kind of social environment they want.

Selection is therefore not primarily a registration mechanism. It is a relationship mechanism.

This creates an interesting historical pattern.

The original encounter emerged partly as a response to a desire for something different from the increasingly large festival culture.

If the encounter itself becomes increasingly large and commercial, a new response may emerge.

Not necessarily a return to Buenos Aires.

Rather, another European adaptation.

From Argentine model to European culture

This is why I hesitate to describe the encuentro simply as an Argentine format.

Its inspiration is strongly connected to Argentine social tango.

Its codes refer explicitly to Buenos Aires.

Its participants may travel to Buenos Aires and learn from Argentine dancers.

But the social problem it solves is European.

The people are dispersed.

The community has to travel.

The event is temporary.

The social network crosses national borders.

And the cultural knowledge has partly been made explicit because the original context is absent.

The encuentro may therefore be one of the clearest examples of what happens when a social practice is transplanted.

It begins as reconstruction.

Over time, it becomes culture.

And once it becomes culture, it can begin to develop problems and solutions of its own.

That is why the history of the encuentro is not simply the history of a dance event.

It is part of the history of how Europeans have learned to create community through tango.